What next? Blacklists?

The Republicans and their whackadoodle friends are determined to drag this country into Hell.  First unions and collective bargaining, now it looks like a revival of Joe McCarthy.  From Yahoo news:

The House Homeland Security hearings on Islamic radicalism that began today have garnered widespread attention, chiefly for the controversies they’ve raised even before they started. Not surprisingly, much of the media focus has been on the strong objections from the left, civil rights groups, Muslim-American activists and others. But the uproar surrounding the investigation led by Home Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R-NY) also serves a broader political purpose–to mobilize movement conservatives.

Protests against the hearing have helped position King and his supporters as terrorism hawks fighting against liberals soft on terror.

King alluded to this “us versus them” battle in his opening remarks at Thursday’s hearing:
I’m well aware that the announcement of these hearings has generated considerable controversy and opposition… Let me make it clear today that I remain convinced that these hearings must go forward, and they will. To back down would be a craven surrender to political correctness and an abdication of what I believe to be the main responsibility of this committee–to protect America from a terrorist attack.

King has argued that radical American Muslims are responsible for most of the terrorist attempts and attacks in the United States. since Sept. 11–and that U.S. Muslim leaders aren’t doing enough to weed out radicalization within the Islamic community.

But critics argue that the hearings demonize all Muslims and will foster more discrimination against Muslim Americans. A coalition of 50 progressive groups this week described the hearings as “little more than a political show trial” in a letter to King objecting to the hearings.

But King and his party’s base take a very different view.

A recent poll from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that Americans were mostly split on whether Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence–40 percent agree and 42 percent disagree. But the survey questions yielded strikingly different results when they were separately directed at conservative respondents. By about 3-to-1, 66 percent of conservative Republicans believe Islam encourages violence more than other religions as opposed to 21 percent do not, according to the poll. Among a pool only of those who “agree with the tea party,” 67 percent agree that Islam encourages more violence than other religions.

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) is an up-and-coming GOP lawmaker firmly aligned with both the tea party and King’s view of the threat posed by militant Islam. West has long railed against Islam and made many inflammatory statements about the religion.

There are many examples of strong anti-Muslim sentiment on the right. Last summer, for instance, conservative activists sought to block a proposed Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan on the grounds that it would serve to inflame the by virtue of its proximity to the former World Trade Center site. Conservative leaders such as Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin weighed in against the project. That furor was part of a general wave of anti-mosque protests on the right, according to Muslim-American activists. A rally last month, attended by two members of Congress and several tea party groups, drew nationwide scrutiny for its anti-Muslim fervor.

But King says the purpose of his hearing is not to feed anti-Muslim sentiment. Rather, he insists that the panel will focus on terrorism and the threat of terrorism from within the Muslim community. And GOP leaders on Capitol Hill echo that view.

“We have got demonstrable occurrences in this country that show we’ve got a risk of the spread of radical Islam,” Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia said this week. “I would say to you it’s pretty obvious where some of the problems have been in terms of terrorist activity. There’s no question that it has been encouraged by the radicalization of folks coming out of Central Asia and the Middle East and have used this as a reason to perpetrate terrorist acts. Again, that’s a fairly well accepted notion at this point and that’s where Chairman King has gone.”

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